1:43 PM,
Jan. 10, 2013

Written by

Charles Paolino
| For NJ Press Media

"Yesterday, upon the stair," goes the Hughes Mearns poem, "I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. I wish, I wish he'd go away."

If Mearns was writing from personal experience, he might have been of interest to Dr. Oliver Sacks, the New York City neurologist and author whose latest book is "Hallucinations." This is an anthology of cases in which men and women - including Sacks himself, under the influence of certain substances - see, hear, feel or smell things that simply are not there.

And although "seeing things" and "hearing things" have long been euphemisms for being ...